When's a good keyword not a good keyword?

Sorry if this has been asked before but: -

When selecting keywords is KEI still a good indicator?
What therefore is an acceptable level of competition before a newbie (ish) like me should avoid a phrase?
Is there one main ratio I should use to evaluate which are possible and which are unlikely to bring results? - If so what ratio should i aim for (E.g. KEI over 10.0 or but never below 5.0 etc....??)

Is it always better to work out the trend of the traffic, see what you could provide good valuable content for and then check competition, PR and backlinks etc??

I always seem to find what I think is a niche in Wordtracker and then the traffic never matches the Wordtracker reslults......

See www.buy-venus-flytrap-plants.com for an example of how desperate I got to finally get some traffic...... Sorry (Its embarassing....)

Actually, I got a kick out of the page. I liked it, and if I had a situation where I needed something to get my kid interested in science, your page probably would have convinced me to buy. Now, on to your question...it all depends on what keyword phrases you are trying to rank for. Determining what to go for is part science and part guesswork. Yes, KEI can be a good indicator, but as you've seen, its not always accurate. And certainly the pure wordtracker numbers are rarely accurate, but they are a gauge. What kind of percentages are you seeing? i.e. compared to what wordtracker said you would see in terms of traffic, what percentage of that number are you actually seeing? you may just need to target a bunch of similar phrases, so that all the small numbers add up to a large number.

If your phrase is Buy Venus Flytrap Plants, you might want to change the title tag to include those words. Also, how many backlinks do you have, and are they using Buy Venus Flytrap Plants as the anchor text?

When selecting keywords is KEI still a good indicator?
What therefore is an acceptable level of competition before a newbie (ish) like me should avoid a phrase?
Is there one main ratio I should use to evaluate which are possible and which are unlikely to bring results? - If so what ratio should i aim for (E.g. KEI over 10.0 or but never below 5.0 etc....??)

Is it always better to work out the trend of the traffic, see what you could provide good valuable content for and then check competition, PR and backlinks etc??

I always seem to find what I think is a niche in Wordtracker and then the traffic never matches the Wordtracker reslults......

See www.buy-venus-flytrap-plants.com for an example of how desperate I got to finally get some traffic...... Sorry (Its embarassing....)

Thanks and sorry

Paul

Hey I liked the site If I was looking to buy such an item I would have purchased myself.

Did you try these search phrases in the meta keywords/descrition/comments tag/alt?
science fair project
science fair idea
get rid of flies
get rid of flys

Hate to plug my own stuff, but if you're going to check keyword difficulty, there's a tool in my signature that's pretty helpful (in my opinion). It'll measure quite a few different pieces of information to help give a comparable number you can use.

I know my point was really to highlight the folly of people telling newbies (Like me) to use Wordtracker - If its said with authority then people will go and use its results to create a site (As my error proves!! - lol (EGOL are you listening???))

Originally Posted by fryman

Wordtracker? KEI? Forget about that rubbish. Nothing beats Overture. I also build niche websites, and Overture is my main tool to see if a site would be worth creating or if I should move on.

For "buy venus flytraps" I see a Overture count of 31. Horrible! I would never waste my time targeting such a horrible keyword. 12 uniques is a huge amount of visitors for it.

"Venus Fly trap Plants" has Overture count of 581. Still horrible, but at least you would get more visits.

"Venus fly trap" has 19376.

Takes experience and time, but soon you will be able to "sniff" good keywords in just a few minutes. I have found wonderful niches this way.

****
Cool! Just got rid of the green belt and now have a blue one. Wit, I want your belt...

KEI is a measure of the number of pages in competition for a search term compared to the number of searches. Lots of searches with small amounts of competition will give you a good KEI number.

If you use KEI know what it is about.

In my opinion the KEI is a good measure of competition for noncommercial SERPs. However, once money is thrown in as a factor you can have a relatively small number of very powerful sites competing - and what appears to be a good KEI number is now a very difficult term.

I use wordtracker to prospect for new keywords and find relationships between keywords. But, I don't use KEI. I think that as Fryman says, a little experience at sniffing the SERPs.... you can tell fairly fast if you can compete or if you will get your *** handed back to you.

* "It's not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, it's the size of the fight in the dog." Mark Twain
* "Free advice isn't worth much. Cheap advice is worth even less." EGOL